


Ghost Town

by heartbeatslows



Category: Danny Phantom
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-05-01
Updated: 2018-05-13
Packaged: 2018-06-04 21:54:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 4,688
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6676783
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heartbeatslows/pseuds/heartbeatslows
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After an accident in the Guys In White's lab, the Ghost Zone leaks into Amity Park.  No one knows what will happen to the town–to reality–when the dead and the living mix, but Danny is determined to set things the way they should be.  Inspired by PhannieMay2016 and returned to for PhannieMay2018.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Origins

I promise you, it was science in the beginning.  For the rest of them, at least, it was a genuine desire to learn more about ectoentities and their strange otherworld "The Ghost Zone."  Knowledge for the sake of knowledge.

The Guys in White were never so innocent a pursuit for me.

I need you to understand, it isn't easy to grow up in Amity Park.  Even before the influx of ghost activity two years before, this has always been a spectral hotspot.  It wasn't rare for a classmate not to show up one day, disappeared.  You wouldn't know they were as good as gone until you heard about the ghost attack from the news on TV.  I remember—the newscasters never said "casualty," never said "dead."  You'd just hear they were "missing."  They were "taken."  They were "seen on site, current whereabouts unknown."

But the thing about the citizens of Amity was that, despite not knowing where their friends were ending up or whether they'd get home, they kept on with their lives as though nothing had changed.  A mayoral announcement and a minute of silence were all these parents, siblings, children would ever get.  And life continued as normal.  Because people getting picked off one by one was considered normal.

Not for me.

So I want you to understand, I didn't mean for things to escalate this far.  And when we're all paying penance for this story, and my name goes down in black…Well.

I don't want to be remembered as a villain.

 

GIW was in a tight spot, which we'd been in for about a year running.  We'd failed to present any kind of conclusive findings about the few subjects we still had, and the higher ups were struggling to squeeze any further funding from the state.  As a government agency, we didn't have the option to ask for donations, and working for free was out of the question (even if it had been legal, passion only goes so far).  The office was tense.  Any day could be the day somebody got cut, and it wasn't like there were many people employing ectobiologists outside GIW.

I was discussing this with a colleague, Operative B, before the disaster occurred.  He and I were working with Specimen C-476-B—if you know him, it's as Klemper.

The specimen was kept in an ecto-environment, a glorified cage with ghost shields for walls and ambient ectoplasm passing through in waves.  We rarely communicated with it—that is, him—and previous investigation had determined that his range of vocabulary was…limited.  Our tests for today were routine: observing his response to auditory, olfactory and magnetic stimuli, taking ectoplasm samples, analyzing his current physicality.  It had been weeks since we'd had any kind of breakthrough, and we were currently running repeatedly into a brick wall trying to quantify the chemical properties of ectoplasm.  Was it an element?  A compound?  A mixture?  Two decades, and all my colleagues and I had succeeded to determine was that it was, resolutely, an enigma.

 "Will you be my—"

"Shut that off," I barked, waving at my assistant.  B hit the mute button on the ghost's cage, and Klemper's query went unanswered.

My expression as bitter as the espresso, I reached for my mug.  At the same time, B reached for his, and knocked the mug of lukewarm mocha onto my shirt and pants.

I let out some obscenities as I stood up, not even bothering to try and rub the stain out.  "That's an 87B-Omega if I've ever seen one," I muttered.  B rolled his eyes.

"No wonder we haven't caught a major ghost in seven years.  We're spending all our budget on laundry fees."

I scowled in response.  "Just imagine–" I ripped off my jacket– "what we could actually get done–" I shoved the suit down a laundry chute– "if we weren't always answering back–" the chute lid slammed shut– "to the damn bureaucracy."

B nodded toward the ecto-environment, where Klemper was slipping on some ice of his own creation.  "This is our legacy, K!" he said, gesturing grandly at the cage.  "Eight years of university for this.  Three cheers to the rest of our lives."

I stepped out of the room after that to get a new coat.  The wardrobe department is practically in the center of the room, right next to the main Ghost Zone portal that we never use because we can't afford to keep laundering the suits we wear in.  The reason, by the way, for the white uniforms is because ambient ectoplasm leaves very noticeable stains in white fabric.  Looking for a stain is the quickest, but certainly not the cheapest, way to determine exposure.

I passed the portal on my way to the laundry.  Once the center of GIW affairs, the enormous artificial cavern was three times higher than my head and totally unmanned.  The portal used to be on all the time, a reminder of the strange mysticism intertwined with our mundane  world.  Now, it was a hollow semidome, the metal rimming the exterior beginning to rust, the white plastic coating stained with a familiar shade of green.

You know, there used to be three armed guards stationed around it at all times; budget cuts and lack of suspicious activity had swept that practice out.  Because nobody in their right mind would turn on the portal without permission.

Now, I know what I'm about to say might make no sense to you.  Looking back, it doesn't make any sense to me, either.  I have to wonder what I might have prevented if I'd never…but that doesn't matter now.

I just need you to understand the state I was in at that moment.  Working for the Guys In White, I put my nose to the grindstone every day, I was subjected to intrusive examinations every week, and I was given a smaller paycheck every month.  I need you to understand that when I moved toward the control panel, I wasn't thinking about where I was.  I was thinking about how after fifteen years, I still hadn't managed the breakthrough I'd dreamed of.  I was thinking about the untapped potential, the pure science we were missing out on, walled in by protocols and regulations.  I was thinking–I don't know.  I wasn't thinking.

But I pressed the button.  I'll admit to that.

The portal seemed to groan as circuits flared.  Connections were made, through wire, through air, through ectoplasm.  The green spiral exploded forward to the confines of the portal up to where the defenses would have locked it in, kept it bound.

But I hadn't turned on the defenses.  They were on a separate panel; I hadn't seen them.

I was standing right in front of the portal when the rolling, roiling ectoplasm thundered ahead.  And as the green otherworld flooded ours, I was seared by its energy.


	2. FentonWorks

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jazz witnesses the end of life as she knows it.

Jazz was doing homework in the Ops Center when she saw the cloud of green, stinging _something_  flooding through the town.

She pressed her hands to the window, looking out over Amity Park.  It seemed to be coming from one central point, growing as it ebbed, not quite regular, not quite uniform, not quite logical.

Yeah.  It was ghosts.

"Mom!" she shouted, in no particular direction.  "Mom, there's a malevolent cloud of ecto-energy threatening to swallow the town!"

There was fumbling on the stairs.  Maddie and Jack arrived, posing with their ectoweapons as though ready to shoot the cloud-thing back into its source.  "Did you say ghosts?" Jack asked, trying and failing to hide his enthusiasm.  Jazz pointed toward the window, and her parents crowded around her.

By now the cloud-thing had spread past the school, past Main Street, edging toward their home.  Jazz peered closer, trying to see into it while it was still about thirty yards away.  It wasn't water, wasn't air, just a bulbous mass of substance unimpeded by the solids in its path.  Shapes moved through it, carried along by the current of its movement, their colors tinted by the ectoplasm.  Ghosts.  Riding the green waves straight into the city.

"Shimmering spirits, is that–"  Jack seemed to be at a loss for words, staring slack-jawed at the pulsing mass.

Jazz looked toward her mother.  Maddie's eyes were hidden behind her goggles, but her rigid posture made her nerves clear.  Seeing her parents' fear stirred Jazz's own stomach, and she wondered fleetingly why she hadn't been equally horrified in the first place.

She answered the question for herself.  She'd been spending too much time with Danny.  She'd begun to believe that any problem could be solved within twenty-four minutes' worth of film-worthy material.  She'd forgotten, or been dulled to, the true horror that ghosts presented.

Well, now she was going to be reminded.  Because if she was right, the Ghost Zone was coming to them.

"Jack, turn on the ghost shield.  Set it to the limits of Amity Park," Maddie said, tension in her voice.  She recovered herself, lifting her bazooka to her chest.  "It may be too late for parts of the town, but we'd better contain this… _thing_  within the city limits."

Jack shook himself, nodded, and pressed one of several emergency buttons on the Ops Center control panel.  Jazz saw the dome descending from above her.  This shield only dropped in dire emergencies, like being transported to another dimension–or having another dimension transported to their own.

"Maddie, get your weapons."  Jack's grim look was matched by his wife's resolute one, and they nodded, in accord with one another for a moment.  Jack looked back at Jazz.

"You, stay inside.  I dropped a second ghost shield around the house.  That'll keep that–whatever it is–out of my fudge!"

"But–where's Danny?" Jazz asked.

"In his room, studying.  Both of you stay here, and don't go out until this thing's taken care of," her father answered.  Jazz wondered for how long that would be true, if it ever even was.

"Bye, sweetie!  We'll be back for dinner!" her mother added, chipper as ever, but then she hesitated.  "Stay safe!" she said, kissing Jazz on the cheek.  Jazz had heard the quaver in her mother's voice, and let it happen.

The two bounded down the stairs.  They'd barely crossed the threshold before Jazz ripped after them and into Danny's room, not bothering to knock.

"Danny?  Danny, are you–"

Of course he wasn't.  Jazz looked around the empty room, knowing her brother had probably phased out of the wall as soon as she'd said "malevolent cloud of ecto-energy," or maybe even before then.  She sighed, pulled out her phone, and texted him a quick message: _Be safe._

She watched the window as the ectoplasm wafted toward her, ever-menacing, ever-advancing.  It grazed the ghost shield, recoiling at its touch, and wrapped around the house, coarsely slinking as though annoyed at being thwarted.  The air was tinted green in its wake, and Jazz imagined the ectoplasmic energy infecting everyone and everything–except her, safe under the ghost shield.  The only one safe.

The lime color reached the town borders, crackled angrily at the ghost shield, and rose to the top of the dome, a shadow over the sun.


	3. Road Trip

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The malevolent cloud of ecto-energy brought company.

Not all of the ghosts in the Zone actually realized they were being sucked into a parallel dimension.  After all, the Ghost Zone was pretty big, and thanks to the naturally unpredictable flux and flow of the ecto-energy there, the swirling vortex-y feeling when the portal opened was sort of brushed off.

But Johnny and Kitty were _there_.

Behind their Door was a world frozen in time, like so many others.  Johnny and Kitty weren't the only ghosts inside, but in another way they were…They didn't think about it too much.

The two of them rode Johnny's bike down a street that bore close resemblance the Main Street in Amity Park, but several decades had been lost, like empty pages in the back of a photo album.  Neon lights flashed in front of radio stores, bars, and genuinely Italian pizza shops.  Teenagers moved in packs down the street, talking loudly and laughing louder, silently pleading for attention.  They looked mundane, if you ignored the shimmering pallor of their skin and the slightly cartoonish slant to their walk, as if copied from a movie or a dream.

Johnny and Kitty weren't really paying attention.  They were headed out, into the rest of the Zone, where most of their friends were.  The ones who'd actually died, or whatever you had to do to become a ghost, rather than the ones behind their Door.

They tore down the street, Kitty's viridescent hair tangling as she felt–imagined?  Was there a difference?–the whipping wind the bike stirred up in its wake.  She leaned further into Johnny, not thinking that this was a pretty good way to be eternally damned, but if someone had asked her, she would have agreed.

Languorous and lethargic, the Door stretched opened as they raced toward it, Johnny revving the engine and Kitty laughing with anticipation.  They crossed, and Kitty wondered if something was different about this time.

She was right.

She recognized the row houses and pavement streets of Amity Park as they rode, the clipped green hedges and tidy window boxes.  The glassy high-rises in the distance, the parks and empty spaces.  But it was quiet.  There was no one in the streets, hardly a stray cat.  The only beings Kitty and Johnny passed were others like themselves, ghosts taking in the confusing change of scene.

Amity Park was awash with ectoplasm, smothered in it.  It hung in the air, not like  a fog but blending, infusing into the colorless backdrop that humans hardly noticed until it changed.

Its more ethereal side was starting to show itself.  Kitty could see it, even if the humans didn't realize that the slight glow everything was starting to give off wasn't just because of the sunlight through the ectoplasmic haze.  The ectoplasm would advance into the human world soon; it was already crawling its way through the outer layers of the bricks and cement of the town.  As they rode farther, she noticed the grass on one of the delicately-protected lawns starting to move on its own, heedless of the wind.

"What's going on?" she yelled to Johnny as they rode.

"Don't look at me," Johnny yelled back.  "I've never seen anything like this."

"Hey, guys!" yelled a voice from behind them.  Johnny pulled the bike around, braking as they spun.  Behind them floated Ember, smirking with anticipation, guitar lifted as if ready to play.

"Ember!  Do you know what's going on?" Kitty yelled up to her.

"No idea."  Her eyes glowed, literally, and she fingered a chord on the guitar.  "What I do know is that this is about to be the biggest ghost party Amity Park has ever seen."


	4. Ember

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The ghosts are out, and it's time to have fun…until someone shows up to crash the party.

“Hello, Amity Park!”

Another wave of cheers rose for every strum of her guitar.  She’d missed the human world, the ease with which she attracted the admiration of mortals, the power that coursed through her every time they said.  Her.  Name.

In lieu of a stage, she’d repurposed Town Hall.  Nothing had been destroyed quite yet; instead she stood on the dome of the building, twirling around the flagpole in the center as she crooned out one defiant rock ballad after another.  They reached for her, groping and hysterical despite being fifty feet below her.  The mass of shrill, faceless things was hers to own.  They loved her.  The power was intoxicating and invigorating at once.

_“Hey, Ember!  I know you’re not big on_ backup _, but how about this?”_

A scorching _pop_ at her back knocked her forward.  Her guitar pressed into her stomach when she landed on it, her back to the air.  Back.  Up.

She rolled over, instinctively positioning her hands to play a riff.  Danny Phantom, ghost annoyance of Amity Park, hovered in front of her with palms smoking.

“This isn’t Battle of the Bands, dipstick,” Ember hissed at him as she stood.  The crowd cheered her on; her hair blazed brighter and higher at their sound.  “Sorry, but there’s only room for one at the top of the charts.”

Danny folded his arms.  “Come on, Ember.  We both know fighting isn’t really your forte.”

Ember scowled, but she didn’t play.  Danny looked agitated, going through the motions of a back-and-forth without real enthusiasm.  On an average day, he’d take a beating.  On a bad day, she’d already be in the stupid thermos.  So he must want something.  The preliminary strike had probably been to get her attention; Phantom didn’t know how to start a conversation with someone without sticking them with an ectoblast.

“What are you even doing here, Ember?” he asked.  Waving a hand at what Ember assumed was the green _everything_ surrounding them, he added, “And what’s with all of this?”

“Hey, don’t look at me,” Ember answered coolly.  “I didn’t start this stuff.  I’m just here to take advantage of a good situation.  And on that note…”

She strummed a hit on her guitar and sent Danny flying backward.  He was just close enough for Skulker to…there it was.  He yanked Danny back by his colorless hair, only shedding his invisibility after he already had a good grip.

“Hey!  Get off of me!”

“Hello, whelp,” Skulker sneered, throwing Danny’s head left and right.  “I, too, think I’ll take this opportunity.  I’ve been wanting your pelt on my wall for some time now.”

“You’re–ouch–working with Ember?”

“Oh, we do a lot more than work.”  Skulker grinned, but Ember wasn’t feeling it.

“Please.  I wish you’d do anything but work.  I try to get any more than a ‘hello’ out of you and you practically turn invisible.”

“Please, dear,” Skulker muttered.  “Now is not the time.”

Danny’s face was twisted into a grimace, though Ember wasn’t sure whether that was because of his scalp or this new revelation.  “Okay, I _so_ wish I could take back the last there minutes.  You two having a lovers’ quarrel is the last thing I ever wanted to see.”

“Would you rather see the inside of a cage?”  Skulker extended a counterproductively large and sharp knife from his mech suit, while Ember rolled her eyes again.  Her fans were starting to get bored with the conversation, of which they could hear little and could understand even less.

“Not likely,” Danny answered.

The sound of the thermos opening didn’t register until after Ember was already inside.

Bodiless and out of control, she and Skulker had nothing to do but wait.  There was silence as he digested the shame of being beaten so quickly.  A silence which Ember irreverently broke.

“This is the most time we’ve spent in the same room in months.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ugh, dialogue isn't my strong suit…I hope you guys liked this anyway! If any of you have tips or suggestions of things I could have done better, please comment!


	5. Dance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In Amity Park, there's a difference between a ghost emergency and ghost emergency worth cancelling prom for, but as Sam and Tucker realize, this might be worse than they first thought.

**Step One: Report the abnormality to the authorities.**

Step One had proven difficult.  No one could contact with the Guys in White: the line was down at their offices and not a single white-suited brute had been seen since the Incident.  The Fentons had been receiving all of the calls in their stead.  Jazz answered the phone since her parents were out investigating the situation.  She was impressed, but not surprised, by the relative calm the citizens seemed to be showing as they relayed the facts.  There hadn’t been any injuries, although there was a surge of confused messages after many found themselves outside Town Hall with no memory of how they’d gotten there.

**Step Two: Find shelter in your home or in a registered Ghost Defense Station.**

The school had already closed its doors, and others who had the misfortune of being outdoors when the Incident occurred were crammed into the library, Town Hall, or (to Mr. Master’s irritation) the mayor’s own home.

**Step Three: As far as is possible, continue business as normal and report building damage to City Hall.**

Casper High was hosting a Freshman/Sophomore social.

An argument amongst the student council had led to schizophrenic decorations.  Half of the gym was decked in sports paraphernalia: lacrosse sticks leaned against the legs of the snack table; model skeletons wearing jerseys posed with soccer balls resting on their metacarpals; a tattered “Go Team!” banner from back when Casper had a Little League team drooped over the double doors.

On the other side of the room, four or five gorgeous paper flowers and several dozen mediocre paper flowers had been tacked to the corkboards.  A few cotton-ball bees were placed by each, so that from a distance the walls looked like it had some kind of fever.  The words “Freshman-Sophomore DANCE PARTY!!!” were painted in rainbow colors over an obscene yellow background.

It looked even worse with the ectoplasm leaking through it.

Sam blinked.  She’d been dutifully watching the wall for probably forty minutes now.  Her eyes had been trained on one spot for so long she was starting to see double.  _Because this is what kids do at parties_.  She scratched her leg through a rip in her stocking and looked over Tucker’s shoulder.  He was tinkering with his PDA, as oblivious to the rest of the “social” as she was.

“Has Danny gotten back to you yet?”

“Not since his last message.  I think he’s still dealing with the ghosts.”

“At what point do we give up on Danny’s diplomacy and go to the Ghost Zone ourselves?”

Tucker didn’t answer.  “Um, hello?”  Sam glanced at him, confirmed that he was still messing with his PDA, and then went right back to watching the wall.

“Um.”  His voice was carefully measured, the what-if-someone’s-listening voice Danny tended to overuse.  “I think the Ghost Zone might be coming to us.”

“What are you talking about?”

Tucker passed over his PDA with no hesitation, a clear sign something serious was going on.  Sam was met with an arrangement of flashing symbols and message boxes, all of which showed more numbers than letters.  “Okay,” she said.  “What am I looking at?”

Tucker explained, “The last time we were in the Specter-Speeder, I downloaded some of the programs the Fentons use to navigate the Ghost Zone.  Look.”  He pointed to one of the blinking shapes, then the number next to it.  It flicked rapidly between two numbers with a difference of four thousands, stopped at the lower of the two, and dropped even lower.

“That number,” he said in an even more hushed tone, “is the number of feet between us and the Ghost Zone.  So either the Fenton’s stuff is malfunctioning–which might be the case, by the way–or the Ghost Zone is closer than we thought.”

“Ten feet,” Sam read.  “So, like, from here to that wall?”

Tucker followed her gaze to the obnoxious yellow poster.  Since he’d last looked up, it had shifted from yellow to neon to lime.  Not only that, but the texture had changed.  The poster wasn’t flush with the wall anymore.  It seemed to ripple, as though touched by a breeze, but of course there was no chance of that in the stuffy gymnasium.

Sam stood up and walked to the wall.  She extended her hand, expecting to touch either gooey ectoplasm or nothing.

She felt neither.  Instead, as she moved her hand closer to the wall, the temperature dropped, but otherwise nothing changed.  She touched the poster, fingers turning pink from the chill, and wisps of verdigris smoke curled toward up from it and inched toward her hand.

She yanked it back, but it took a long time for her hands to get warm.


	6. Swap

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There's something wrong at the GIW Lab.

My mouth opens and I gasp, gagging on something, on nothing.  The floor should be a clean white but everything is smudged and green and my hands are so dark, my arms are so dark, like navy and sapphire and charcoal and vomit and I grope forward, bleary-eyed, opening my eyes just in time to watch my blackened hand pass through the floor itself.  I recoil, drawing my hand back toward me, even as my knees begin to slip into the tile as though it were quicksand.

“No!”  I bolt away and the floor runs from me as well; it recedes and recedes until it jolts to a stop.  This can’t be real.  I rub painfully at my eyes, trying to look around even though my vision is still hazy…everything seems _green_ , and it's so very cold…Around me, the room is all too familiar.  This is the basement below the portal, once filled with interns and equipment, now empty, abandoned, and the walls are bleeding lime and I’m floating above the floor and I don’t.  Have.  Legs.  In their place is a tail made of the same navy blue as my skin.  My lab coat, now as true a black as it once was white, hangs useless over my skinless lower half.

I drop like a stone to the earth and I'm surprised when I hit the ground.  I want to scramble to my feet but they've disappeared; I’m left scrabbling against the all-too-familiar linoleum and gaining nothing.  Somewhere beyond that door is my own office.  I have to get to my _office_ , I think to myself, and suddenly I'm swimming through the mist-like green haze to get there.  I reach for the handle and find I don't need to.  Instead I pass through it, and as I go, I hear a voice echo through the vent from above.

“Squadron eight J six, reporting for duty to inspect portal breach.  Waiting for word to approach…”

Down the hall, my coworkers are nowhere to be found.  The LEDs overhead send wispy streams of light through the fog.  As I float along, my shadow falls on the tile so loosely as to not be there at all.  The doors in this hallway are unlocked, but behind them are abandoned desks, papers in disarray, chairs still slowly spinning.  My coworkers are nowhere to be found.

In the office next door to mine, a specimen is locked in a containment chamber.  A blue nothing of a ghost – a generic specter under the moniker Q4519.  He has the head and hands of a homunculus, lips grotesque and tongue obscene, but below the waist, his body trails off into a wisp of smoke and tail.  He gives me a wide-toothed smile.

“Whoa, new guy,” he lisps through his zipper-like teeth.  “Who’th thi’th?  Never mind.  Do me a th’olid and lemme out, wouldya?  You can’t be the only one having all the fun.”

I stare agape at the ghost.  It presses itself against the tough glass, pleading with its eyes.  It’s vile.  And I…

“I…I…”

The words fall from my lips.  I am _this._   I am an undead creature.  I am a parasite to the universe; I am a plague.  I am a mistake of nature, I am the shame of this plane, I am a broken thing.  I have to get out of here.

“Hey, come on!  What’th the big idea?”

The words persist even as I spin around, make a beeline for anywhere but here _._   I overlook the door entirely, instead turning directly for the wall ahead.

“Alright, fine, get losh’t!  I’ll find my own way out!”

My vision darkens as I pass through.  My eyes are open.  It doesn’t seem to mean anything.  There’s another containment chamber here.  It’s not ghosts inside.

They have dark eyes, fear and anger and hatred all pointing at me as I appear.  They bear grim expressions and lime-stained white jackets.  The locked _themselves_ in here, breathing the only clean air untouched by the swirling green poison.  They stare me down like I’m an enemy.  An abomination.

B’s eyes are locked on mine.  I see no recognition from him, at least not yet, and in my cowardice I am glad.  His fury is so total and his disdain so overwhelming that I shrink away, forgetting in that moment that I was once his superior.  I was him and so much more.  I _should_ be him.  This is wrong.  I’m wrong.  This isn’t me.  It’s wrong.  It’s wrong.  It’s wrong.

I should have been human.

What have I done?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello all! I bet you didn't think this would ever get updated :) sometimes I didn't either! But I'm finally in a place where I can continue with this story. PhannieMay 2018 has given us a lot of good prompts, and I've improved significantly as a writer since this was first posted. Can't wait to finish this story off with you all!


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